by Iain Gale
‘It’s an old joke, Luigi.’
‘But seriously, sir. It’s no surprise that we all have dysentery or something worse.’
Ruspoli detected that perhaps they might have gone too far. ‘Think yourself lucky, boys, that we only have the shits. General Ceriana’s got colitis. Did you know that? They say he’s very ill.’
‘Perhaps another camel will wander into the camp. Beats me how the last one got through our minefield.’
‘Didn’t you hear, Carlo? You must have been away on attachment. The British had cleared a path through it in the night. Five metres wide. We had to get the mobile sappers out to re-lay the whole damn thing.’
‘But you ate the camel?’
‘Of course. It made a very tasty ragout. Didn’t we save you any?’
Mautino shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t have kept. But I’m sorry to have missed it. Perhaps another one will come.’
Santini spoke: ‘If it does, sir, then we should really worry. The Brits’ll be right behind it.’
Ruspoli wondered what his family would make of him eating camel. He supposed that at some point one of his ancestors might have done the same. Perhaps on a crusade. They were princes of Florence, a warrior family. But while one ancestor fought with distinction at Lepanto against the Turks another was a poet. It was often the way with Italian soldiers. Fighting and poetry went hand in hand. They had raised a regiment in 1708 to defend the Pope against the Austrians.
He thought of the family home, high on the hilltop in Umbria. Castello Ruspoli with its acres of olive groves and vineyards. What he would give now for a sip of that heavenly wine or just one of those olives. He supposed that his elder brother Costantino was thinking the same thoughts wherever he now was on this damn battlefield. At fifty-one he must have been one of the oldest men in the fighting. But he was still fit. Ruspoli knew where Costantino’s unit was meant to be, but in this war who knew if anything was where they told you it was. As for little brother Carlo, the baby of the family and still in his thirties, well, it was anyone’s guess where he might be, flying his fighter across the desert skies, chasing the RAF.
It was amusing he thought, that the family should be able to trace its origins back to the Scots. To Marius Scotus from somewhere called Galloway, after whom he had been named. His mother of course was French. Pauline Talleyrand, great-great-niece of Napoleon’s foreign secretary. He knew that across the sand a Scottish division and a regiment of Free French were waiting to attack them. Not least, his own mother-in-law, his darling Virginia’s mother, was English. So how could he hate the enemy? So much irony. But then he supposed that was what war was all about. Absurdities, like the camel and Luigi’s spanner.
But they were all Italians here. Mostly men from the north and whatever their families’ origins, high or humble, he respected them. They were his men, all of them. Men like Aroldo Conticello, the baker’s son from Orvieto and Umberto Galati, just nineteen, from Pavia, who liked to wear his hair long. How it infuriated his company commander, thought Ruspoli. Tenente Piccini was forever shouting at Galati to get a haircut but Galati would only ever have a trim.
He would come back and protest: ‘It’s enough, Tenente. Just enough.’ But back he would be sent to the battalion barber only to return too soon and then Piccini would shout again. Ruspoli smiled. Such things were necessary when death stalked a battlefield looking for his next victim. Anything to keep the men amused. Ruspoli was still thinking about them as he walked along the trench. It was eerily quiet. Perhaps there was something in what Mautino had said. This was not right. He’d be happier when that report came through. He heard voices up ahead and stopped. The men were talking. Intrigued, Ruspoli stood and kept silent and listened.
‘So tell me this, Lorenzo. Why are the Germans our allies? My father fought against Rommel himself at Monte Matajur, Caporetto, in the last war. He was wounded. Never recovered. Now that German butcher’s our commander. Where’s the sense in that?’
‘Actually, General Frattini is our commander. And Rommel’s no butcher, Giovanni. He’s an honourable man and a good general.’
‘Frattini? In your dreams, Lorenzo. Don’t get me wrong. He’s one of the good ones, the general. Wasn’t he our commander when we formed? But now even he has to take orders from the Germans.’
Another voice cut in: ‘And what about the Yanks? Some of the guys have got cousins living in the States. What if they end up fighting against them?’
Ruspoli rounded the angle of the trench. On seeing their CO the men stood up and snapped smartly to attention. Ruspoli waved them down: ‘Not here, boys. America hasn’t sent any troops here yet. Don’t worry, you won’t meet an American in this desert let alone fight against one. Besides, do I look worried? You know me. I was born in New York. My brother too. Then we came home to the motherland. How do you think I’d feel killing an American? You might say I am one myself. So shoot me!’
They laughed together. But their smiles turned quickly to looks of concern with the arrival of a runner. Twenty-three-year-old Captain Pietro Bonini saw Ruspoli and saluted, then paused to get his breath back. One of the best in his regiment, thought Ruspoli. A shrewd boy who always had a knack of being in the right place at the right time.
‘Bonini. You have news?’
‘The radio’s down, sir. Nothing. So I ran to Division. I had the good luck to encounter Colonel Guiglia.’
‘The radio wizard?’
‘The very same, Colonel.’
‘That man has a nose for radio signals. He can guess their contents long before our deciphering teams get it. Heaven alone knows how he does it. So what’s up?’
‘There’s going to be an attack.’
‘We know that, Pietro, but when?’
‘Well, Guiglia said, “Mark my words, Capitano. It’s a question of hours, not days!”’
Ruspoli said nothing. He looked into the dark, frightened eyes of one of his men and then turned back to Bonini. ‘You’re quite sure that’s what he said, Pietro?’
‘Certain, Colonel. He said that the British radio activity had really fallen off. There’s something going on in the southern sector. Down here in fact, between Qaret el Homar and Somaket e Gaballa. His men had picked up lots of messages meaning nothing. You know, “X279, I’ll call you back”. That sort of thing. He seemed certain, sir. And he was sweating.’
Ruspoli nodded. He knew exactly what Guiglia meant. The attack was imminent. And there was no doubt in his mind. They would come tonight.
FOUR
6.00 p.m. Some way to the rear of Kidney Ridge Major Tom Bird
The long day wore on. Tom Bird carefully unfolded the letter he had written to his parents two days before and began to draw a picture. It showed two of the men of his unit, both officers, chatting over a boiling stewpot in the style of Jon’s ‘Two Types’ featuring two popular cartoon characters – officers in the desert, one army the other RAF.
In Bird’s picture one of them was wearing a hebron coat, that gloriously non-regulation bit of kit made from cured goatskins, which he himself had not been alone in adopting among the British officers. He was pleased with the drawing. He knew that he had some talent as a draughtsman and had for a while dallied with the idea of art school but architecture was his true métier. He thought that perhaps after the war he might join a good practice or even form his own. A partnership. After the war; that was a good one. Who knew how long it would go on? What Bird knew was that Hitler needed a proper bloody nose. They needed to prove that they weren’t frightened of him, that they could give as good as they got and that was what they were here for. His father had been wounded at Gallipoli in 1915 fighting against Germany’s then ally, Turkey, and had never spoken of his experiences.
Bird took care when he wrote home. He knew that his father must be aware of what he was going through. The extraordinary, bizarre, once-in-a-lifetime experience of war. But he did not want to cause his parents any undue worry. He had good reason. His brother had been killed at Calais
in 1940 and the loss was achingly raw. His brother’s death he knew was at least in part why he was here. Not for revenge but from a sense of justice. He felt the need to right a wrong against a foe who must in any case be defeated at all costs. A foe so monstrous that they stood against everything he held dear.
As always, then, he had tried to lighten the tone of the letter, writing with schoolboyish expression about his friends and comrades as if they were all about to take part in some momentous rugby match: ‘Hugo Salmon still my second-in-command and Jack Toms is another great standby. I should hate to be without either of them now…I may not write again for a little bit. Best of love, Tom.’
That was it. His father he knew would see through the last line and know instantly why he would not be able to write ‘for a little bit’. His mother though must suspect nothing. For her to know that her only surviving son was about to be thrown against the might of the German army would kill her or at least drive her mad.
And their enemy was mighty. Of that he had no doubt. Over the past two years they had conquered most of Europe and had run circles around the British army in North Africa. Now though it might just be their turn. The talk in the mess was all about the newly-arrived ordnance. Hundreds of tanks, great war machines that rumbled forward on tracks, unstoppable, able with a single shot to destroy a house. Tanks. That was what this battle, this war, was all about. The Germans had started out with many more, and better. Tanks filled him with dread. He had a secret fear of being crushed beneath a caterpillar track. A fear which he had never told anyone. A fear that had him waking in the night in a cold sweat. Tanks.
Bird wished to God that they had just a few of the new Sherman tanks with them. Instead, they had guns, the new six-pounder guns that they said could take out a tank with ease. He had yet to see it. And now they were under his command. He had been thrilled to get his own company. He had been promoted to major now and had a bar to his MC as well. He’d won that back in July at Gazala. He had been in the south with the Free French in the Bir Hakeim box, fighting the Italian Trieste and Ariete Divisions and the Twenty-First Panzers. He’d taken a column of twenty-five lorries carrying food and ammunition through minefields to reach the beleaguered French in their strongpoint. And once there, the commanding officer of the French garrison, General Koenig, had persuaded him to break out. They’d done it and saved 27,000 men from being taken. On top of that he’d captured fourteen Jerry prisoners and not had a single casualty among his own men.
It was more, far more than he had thought he would achieve when he had joined back in ’40. He knew that it had much to do with Colonel Turner’s opinion of him. People had wondered why he had joined the Rifle Brigade, or the Sixtieth Rifles as the colonel liked to refer to them. For of course they were not a brigade at all but a regiment, one of the finest and proudest in the British army. A regiment that had come out of the colonial war as a response to the American practice of using light infantry skilled with smoothbore rifles. A regiment that had fought with pride against the French in the peninsula.
The colonel was a sound chap. More than that, a father-figure, or as Bird often thought of him, like a kindly housemaster from his old school. The regiment was like that. An extended family. The mess was filled with Etonians and Wykehamists. Sometimes Bird sympathized with the newly-commissioned officers who had to infiltrate this public-school elite. ‘Temporary gentlemen’ were not always welcome in the mess. He did not mind them himself, but there were others who did. The lads were good enough though. They’d come through a lot in recent weeks. They were Londoners mostly, Eastenders, most of them conscripted into the ranks. But none the worse for that. And then there were the old sweats, the NCOs. They’d taken to the new men, had spent some time on them and it had worked. Bird felt that now he was in command of an efficient fighting unit. In fact they constituted a formidable little brigade; 2nd Battalion had three motorized infantry companies, a carrier platoon, a machine-gun platoon and most importantly his four platoons of six-pounders, sixteen guns in all. Aside from that the colonel had also been given an attached force of another eleven guns from 239 battery of 76 AT regiment RA.
They were all mounted on ‘portees’, lorries from whose flat-bed top the gun could be slid down and into position. It was not an ideal method of transport, slightly Heath Robinson-ish. But it gave them mobile anti-tank power and that was vital in this war of machines. All day they had been sitting here, keeping watch over the minefields. Static and in support. It was not his way and he was impatient to be in the action. But Bird knew that their time would come and when it did, he knew too that they would acquit themselves with honour, whatever the odds.
FIVE
6.00 p.m. Tactical HQ, Eighth Army The beach, El Alamein General Bernard Law Montgomery
It was, anyone could see, a superb defensive position. And he cursed himself for not having been the man who had found it. For this was Auchinleck’s position, a defensive line chosen by the General whom he had been brought in to replace. Auchinleck – the man who had failed in all else but this. The chance to define this sublime line which ran for forty-five miles from the Mediterranean in the north, due south across the desert to the impassable vastness of the great Quattara Depression. It was the last line of defence between the enemy and Cairo. The perfect place to make a last stand. Here it was that they had fallen back to in the face of the enemy’s last attempt to take the city. Here it was that they had regrouped and rested. And it would be from here, he knew, that they would attack.
He looked at the map spread out before him on the table which stood in the middle of his small command caravan and traced a line along it from north to south. Forty miles of front line, all of it more or less level but with two passages of high ground: Ruweisat Ridge and Alam Nayil. Though on the map it looked flat, Montgomery, like the men who had lived out there in the desert, some of them for two years, knew that it was far from that. That it was marked by small hillocks and dunes, dips that seemed as hard to climb as ravines and sheer drops that could catch you off your guard and swallow you up. And it was not just sand, but rock and everywhere was punctuated by clumps green bushes of sharp camel-thorn. There were no roads and precious few houses. In short, it was the perfect terrain for modern, mechanized warfare. And ‘modern’ was a word that he liked very much. The whole essence of modern warfare could be reduced to three things: concentration, control and simplicity.
In short it was about modernity. It was the only way to win. Complete change in the British army. Dunkirk had taught him that. But it had taken till now to bring it in. Two long years. So many of the old guard had gone now, he thought, and they were so much the better for it. There was Ritchie, sacked after the Gazala disaster in June and his replacement Corbett who everyone knew to be an idiot. ‘A complete fathead’ his chief of staff had called him. So Gott had been brought in. Old ‘Strafer’ Gott. And it had been he that Montgomery had replaced. Though it had been unfortunate that it should have happened the way it had with Gott being killed in a plane crash. Montgomery had simply been the next man in line. In truth he knew that the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, had turned Churchill’s ear.
And what great good fortune to have been given such a chance. Surely God was rewarding him for his faith over the years and his devotion to the army. The army had been his life. Was still. Of course his late wife Betty had been so dear to him and her sudden and quite unexpected death, exactly five years ago this month had left a dreadful vacuum in his life that could never be filled. But at least he had their son, David, now thirteen. He’d left him at school at Winchester when he’d come out here, in the care of his former headmaster from prep school. David was just a boy, but, he reflected, he was not that much younger than so many of the ‘men’ he now led.
He turned to see his ADC, John Poston, a twenty-three-year-old captain in the 11th Hussars. Poston was a pleasant Old Harrovian, a good horseman who had been in the desert since 1940 having joined straight from school. He was only t
en years older than David, he thought. A fine, handsome young man with a pair of honest and engaging pale grey eyes. He had taken to young Poston instantly on his arrival in the desert, and had asked for him in particular. Well, he had also been poor Gott’s former ADC and he clearly knew the ropes. Wouldn’t drive him into a minefield as young Spooner, the ADC he had brought with him from England, had done on his first day. Montgomery smiled at the boy’s clothes. Like so many of his officers, particularly those in the cavalry and yeomanry, he had adopted his own style of dress: suede desert boots, spotted silk cravat, corduroy trousers. Montgomery indulged it. He knew Poston to be somewhat apart from the class-conscious society of the mess and admired him for his simple professionalism. Hadn’t he himself been somewhat unorthodox in his own dress? He followed Wellington’s dictum; what mattered was not following the drill book to the letter but the quality and professionalism of the man. Besides, hadn’t he re-written the drill book?
‘Did you realize, John, that we have the longest supply routes the history of warfare has ever known?’
‘I think I overheard you say as much to the Field Marshal, sir.’
‘What very sharp hearing you have.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
Montgomery tugged at his right earlobe, a habit of which he was hardly aware but which was often remarked on behind his back. ‘No matter, you should know in any case, John. It is true. Although unlike Herr Rommel of course, our lines are not at full stretch. It will be all about materiel, this battle. Rommel needs fuel and he needs ammunition and according to our intelligence, he does not have sufficient supplies of either.’
Intelligence, he thought, was everything, worth fifty thousand men on the battlefield. And they had the finest intelligence in the war – Ultra. The code-breakers at Bletchley Park were now able to break the German Enigma code. Since 1941 they had been receiving intelligence based on radio messages from Fliegerführer Afrika. But he knew too that intelligence alone could not win a battle. It was down to the generals and it was down to the men. In his case men who were itching for victory, the men of Eighth Army. Men who had fought at Gazala and been twice up to Benghazi. The ‘Benghazi handicap’ they liked to call it. Men who had run from Tobruk to be able to fight again. Well, this was their battle and everything was at stake. Not just the Allies’ vital hold on the Middle East and Suez. But also he knew, as Churchill did, the war itself and indeed his own position as leader of the nation.
